Effortless

Effortless is pattern to better manage Chef and Chef InSpec workloads using Chef Habitat.

Quick Links

• Chef Infra - Chef Infra automates infrastructure configuration, ensuring every system is configured correctly and consistently.

• Chef InSpec - Automate security tests, ensuring consistent standards are enforced in every environment, at every stage of development.

• Chef Habitat - Codify how the application is built, how it runs, and all of its dependencies to free the app from underlying infrastructure and make updates easy.

• Chef Automate - Enterprise dashboard and analytics tool enabling cross-team collaboration with actionable insights for configuration and compliance and an auditable history of changes to environments.

Existing Users

If you're already familiar with the Chef stack, here's a quick rundown of how Effortless works.

1. Effortless uses a build process to pull down all your cookbooks or profiles. The build creates a single, deployable package. For Chef Infra, it contains your cookbooks, an up-to-date Chef Infra client, and the latest best practices. For Chef InSpec, it contains your profiles, an up-to-date Chef InSpec client, and the latest best practices.

2. At runtime, Chef Infra works without Chef Infra Server. It uses Chef Solo mode.

3. At runtime, Chef InSpec works without pulling profiles from Chef Automate. All profiles, including those from Chef Automate, are vendored at build time.

4. Chef Habitat manages Chef Infra and Chef InSpec, and provides a pull-based update strategy for continuous delivery.

5. This workflow is a replacement for the environment and role cookbook patterns or Berkshelf way.

Chef 19 Support

As of v0.26.0, the scaffolding-chef-infra has been updated to support Chef Infra Client 19:

Change	Details
Ruby version (Linux/ARM)	core/ruby3_4 (was core/ruby31)
Ruby version (Windows)	core/ruby3_4-plus-devkit (was chef/ruby31-plus-devkit)
Habitat Builder channel	base-2025 (required for Chef 19 packages)

Certified Platforms for Chef 19

Platform	Architecture	Status
Linux	x86_64	✅ Certified
Linux	ARM	✅ Certified
Windows	x86_64	✅ Certified
Windows	ARM	🔄 In progress (CHEF-33898)
macOS	x86_64	🔄 In progress (CHEF-33898)
macOS	ARM	🔄 In progress (CHEF-33898)

Migrating from Chef 18 to Chef 19 Effortless

If you are currently using the Effortless pattern with Chef 18, no changes to your user-facing plan.sh or plan.ps1 are required. The scaffolding automatically resolves the correct Ruby and Chef client versions. Simply update your pkg_scaffolding to pick up the latest chef/scaffolding-chef-infra from the base-2025 channel.

If you pin scaffold_chef_client explicitly, ensure it points to a Chef 19 package (e.g., chef/chef-infra-client/19.x.x).

Note: The scaffolding defaults HAB_BLDR_CHANNEL to base-2025. You can override this per-package by setting scaffold_hab_bldr_channel in your plan.sh / plan.ps1.

Next Steps

If you are new to the Effortless pattern checkout some of the below examples and walk throughs that will help you understand what you can do with this pattern.

Examples

1. Effortless Audit
2. Effortless Config